An aerostat comes out of the east. It approaches with its sedate, predatory bobbing, makes its way fatly toward them.

The thuggish wyrmen yelp and blather obscenities as they fly. They become specks against the distended whale of leather; they buzz its gondola, make it sway a little. Judah hears flat sounds like paper bags bursting that must be gunshot, and the wyrmen scatter. They drop. They fall where they are, folding their wings and plummeting in unison, curving toward the train, and there is a crumbling sound, a huge clearing of the throat, and glass and black smoke gust out of the aerostat windows.

-Yes, Uzman says.

The dirigible rocks. Gunpowder smog swells from the underbelly. It will limp home to New Crobuzon, or to the base over the horizon, where attack squads of militia are waiting for directions. Where other airships are stationed. Bigger warflots with bombs to drop. With windows that clay-pot grenades won’t breach.

New Crobuzon has found them. That night there is a meeting, and it is beyond chaos. Ideas clamour with ideas. It is all shouting. The women who had been whores have delegated Ann-Hari to speak for them.

Others find them. Out of the grasslands come figures. The iron council is shedding word of its own self along songlines no one can see. It draws the dispossessed, the outlawed.

FReemade. A little tribe. Escapees from New Crobuzon, feral a long time. The leader is a man without arms, with useless ornamental beetle wings. There is a man with rubberised pincers, a man who wears a crocodile’s snout, a huge cur with the head of a pretty woman. The dog’s is a male body. By the skins they wear and the jewellery of holed stones on sinews, by their complexions like wood and tea, Judah knows they have been fReemade for years.

-We heard about you, one man says. He and his family are staring at the train. They are not looking at the guards, nor at Judah, nor at his golem made of the bones of meat-birds. -You’re going west, they say. You’re crossing the world.

-They say, he says, -you’re building a new life. Out of sight.

-We come to ask, he says, and pauses. -We come to ask… the man says.

And Judah, mandated by the council, nods: yes you can join us.

Nomads in numbers. Criminals and runaways. Plains races and outsiders-striders who wordlessly lope trainside, even a garuda easing out of the sky and made air marshal over the quarrelsome wyrmen. The iron council absorbs them.

They are surrounded by strange, unlikely truces between armed fReemade toughs and the borinatch braves who swing by the train with their unlikely grace. We are protected, Judah thinks. They’re here to give us gods-speed. To help us go.

The bounty hunters harry them three more times in quick, vicious raids. The gunmen ride away before there can be much retribution.